Camp Chef

Utah-based company elevates the outdoor cooking experience.

“Dependable, quick, reliable. Camp Chef puts a lot of thought into their products,” says Brett Prettyman, an avid outdoorsman who wears many hats. As director of communications for Trout Unlimited, president-elect of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, writer/producer of the popular television show The Utah Bucket List, and father of three busy kids, he’s used Camp Chef gear in about every imaginable setting, from prepping breakfasts for film crews to feeding his daughter’s Girl Scout troop. “Their Dutch ovens are the only ones I own, and during the Bucket List shoot, we used their stoves to feed the entire crew. It’s pretty much the best gear in the business to use for any kind of car-camping situation.”

When Camp Chef owner Ty Measom started the Utah-based company in 1990, he recognized that people working and recreating in the outdoors were struggling trying to find solid and durable equipment built to last. The original Camp Chef 2-burner camp stove fit the bill with sturdy construction, versatile packable design, powerful burners, and—crucial for cooking in Utah’s unpredictable outdoors—substantial fold-up windscreens on three sides. For everything from parking-lot tailgating to setting up deer camp, this Camp Chef stove became an industry go-to for feeding a crowd. By using a standard propane tank adapter, these sturdy stoves can handle making several big meals over multiple days, without the waste and hassle of using smaller single-use 16.4 ounce fuel cylinders. The company headquarters in Hyde Park—north of Logan—serves as a jumping-off point for field-testing Camp Chef products in the nearby Bear River Mountain Range.

Since the debut of the original camp stove, Camp Chef products have grown with consumer demand to include BBQ boxes, flat-top griddles and pizza ovens. The company also makes single-burner backpacking stoves, but the majority of Camp Chef products are geared toward cooking for a group, from classic Dutch ovens to substantial patio smokers, grills and even backyard fire pits. My husband recently went on a snow goose hunt on the chilly Nebraska plains, where a Camp Chef portable oven kept a crew of hungry hunters happy three meals a day in the shooting blind. He told me later, “The camp cook made everything in that oven: breakfast burritos, steak and potatoes, cheesesteak sandwiches, braised pork ribs, you name it.” I fed him salads for a week after in recovery.
The Dutch ovens are especially well designed for camp cooking with coals or at home on the stove-top range and in the oven. Folks who’ve had the dreaded ‘ashes-drifting-into-the-dinner’ fiasco occur with traditional-lidded Dutch ovens will be pleasantly surprised when they use a flat-surfaced Camp Chef lid, which, when flipped over, doubles as a griddle or skillet.

At a recent Outdoor Writers Association conference, Prettyman recalls staff from Camp Chef prepared a full Dutch oven breakfast at the Lee Kay Education Center, and “it was everyone’s favorite meal. They did an amazing job cooking everything in cast iron.” He also recommends the Camp Chef Cookbook for anyone nervous about Dutch oven cooking, especially over coals, saying “that cookbook made me dive into the world of cooking on coals. It even specifies the number of coals you should use on top of the lid and underneath the oven” to get the best results. A unique square Dutch oven option available through Camp Chef allows for greater surface area available for cooking on camp stoves, and has a notch to thread a meat thermometer into the oven, making for hands-free roast meats cooking when utilizing a thermometer remote.
The folks at Camp Chef claim, “Great tasting food will always bring people together and Camp Chef has that figured out.” We’ll happily agree to that.